Beep Edition comes to Drupal8

I’ve never had particularly lofty ambitions for Beep Edition, the responsive base theme I started a few years ago. Rather than make a new ‘all singing, all dancing’ kind of theme, I wanted this to be my starting point, and include all of my collected experience in responsive design, accessibility, typography and general good practice. Having started this idea while developing the platfrom for Schoolyard in Drupal 6, I became convinced that having this kind of sensible starting point was the key to getting the most out of Drupal while maximizing time for design. It let me skip over the basics and get to the real differentiators, because I knew I had a solid foundation that would ‘just work.’ Since then it’s been downloaded over 4,300 times, so hopefully it’s helped others as it’s helped me.

Now that Drupal 8 has been released, I decided it was time to dive in and get to know D8 and Twig, the new templating language. Due to how easy it is to customize markup and point to specific libraries, it also gave me the opportunity to experiment with some new code for accessible navigation on small screens. It turns out that it’s far easier now to include these kinds of external resources. I’m hoping to explore taking this further to see how feasible it is to incorporate other kinds of coded style guides like PatternLab.

The D8 version is now live on Drupal.org. It uses Sass, Bourbon+Neat, and Grunt, all of which are pretty easy to get running and make the build process really simple. Hope you find it useful, and in good community fashion, please get in touch if you have any questions or would like to contribute.